Burn Notice, 'A Dark Road': Cagney, Lacey and Michael Westen

Jeffrey Donovan in "Burn Notice."A quick review of the "Burn Notice" winter premiere coming up just as soon as I have the sewing skills of an orangutan...

"People need me. So I have to." -Michael"Yes, I guess you do." -Madeline

The
first half of this season of "Burn Notice" set up a couple of story
arcs - Michael loses the "protection" of management, and Michael tries
to get unburned - with a lot of potential I'm not sure the episodes
entirely lived up to. But the back half of the season starts very
strongly with "A Dark Road, which sets up an intriguing new adversary
in the unseen Mason Gilroy, while also presenting a terrific episodic
story for Michael, Sam, Fi and, especially, Madeline.

Like
Chuck Bartowski, Madeline Westen is a character who's reluctantly
learning the tricks of the spy trade through someone she cares dearly
about. Even if the casting of Sharon Gless's old "Cagney & Lacey"
partner Tyne Daly didn't give the intelligence asset story an extra
kick, seeing Madeline wrestle with befriending and then having to
destroy Tina was a great showcase for Gless. It was also a nice
exploration of the mother/son relationship and of Michael's dawning
realization that being a vigilante isn't what he does just to kill time
until he's unburned, but a calling he can't ignore.

The
insurance scam plot also displayed the show's reliance on good
old-fashioned practical stuntwork, as we saw with the various
high-speed car chase scenes. At press tour, "Burn Notice" creator Matt
Nix turned up to talk about a show he's doing for Fox called "Code 58,"
about a cop with a mindset stuck back in the '80s, but who's effective
despite his throwback methods. I watch a scene like Michael out-racing
Ryan as a job audition, or Michael and Sam racing to stop Ryan from
pulling the train scam without them, and I can see where Nix is coming
from with the "Code 58" character. Car chases used to be a staple on
television and in movies, but they fell out of fashion, partly because
there were too many of them, but mostly because people started getting
lazy about them. When you do them with enough imagination and energy -
and add them to a story and characters we care about even without the
muscle cars - they can still be very, very cool.

And on top of
that, we got the usual spy advice, like the value of using an acetylene
torch as a kind of bullet-proof shield, or that you can fit a bug
inside a car remote control keyring.

Couple all that with the
intriguing marine stadium location, and the fact that Michael has no
idea what Gilroy's game is, and the usual Bruce Campbell-related comedy
gold ("What's wrong, Sam? I've never seen you drink a beer that
slowly."), and I was very happy to be back in this world again.